Corning Case Study

Corning Glass Works Case

Decrease in Yield

Overall Yield of the process was decreasing because of the following reasons:

There was an inability to identify problems in the early stages due to the existence of high degree of inter relation between the three processes thus producing excessive default products

There was difficulty in controlling and fine tuning of the processes as there was no standard approach to trouble shooting

There was a lack of direction regarding how to set a course of action to solve the problem at hand. Most of the time, the team was fire fighting rather than trying to sort out the root cause of the problem

There were a high number of process control variables at each stage. This combined with the high downtime limited the yield at the plant.

There was a lack of skill, judgment and knowledge of the processes by the inexperienced supervisors. Most of the supervisors had been at the plant less than 9 months.

The finishing process was a high speed job shop operation involving a range of coatings and a high level of customization, which made this an inefficient process.

Lack of formal documentation of the tacit knowledge and experience related to the effective execution of the processes. This is most important as it takes considerable time to learn about a process which is not standardized. So by having this kind of knowledge management systems in place one can learn and adapt to the situation very quickly and also one don’t have to worry about attrition.

Evaluation of Davidson’s Approach

Eric Davidson already had six years of work experience at Corning and had completed several projects at the M&E Division. He had a reputation of being able to take on challenging assignments and succeeding at it. He took on a scientific approach towards problem solving by collecting data and defining the problem. He also identified a small group of four specialists each successful at his/her field of expertise...